Evaluating the impact of strategic personnel policies using a MILP model: The public university case
Abstract: The main purpose of
the paper is to evaluate the impact of diverse personnel policies around
personnel promotion in the design of the strategic staff plan for a public
university. The strategic staff planning consists in the determination of the
size and composition of the workforce for an organization.
Design/methodology/approach: The staff planning is solved using a Mixed
Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model. The MILP model represents the
organizational structure of the university, the personnel categories and
capacity decisions, the demand requirements, the required service level and
budget restrictions. All these aspects are translated into a set of data, as
well as the parameters and constraints building up the mathematical model for
optimization. The required data for the model is adopted from a Spanish public
university.
Findings: The development of appropriate policies for personnel promotion
can effectively reduce the number of dismissals while proposing a transition
towards different preferable workforce structures in the university.
Research limitations/implications: The long term staff plan for the
university is solved by the MILP model considering a time horizon of 8 years.
For this time horizon, the required input data is derived from current data of
the university. Different scenarios are proposed considering different temporal
trends for input data, such as in demand and admissible promotional ratios for
workers.
Originality/value: The literature review reports a lack of formalized
procedures for staff planning in universities taking into account, at the same
time, the regulations on hiring, dismissals, promotions and the workforce
heterogeneity, all considered to optimize workforce size and composition
addressing not only an economic criteria, but also the required workforce
expertise and the quality in the service offered. This paper adopts a
formalized procedure developed by the authors in previous works, and exploits
it to assess the impact of various personnel policies in the staff planning for
a particular university case, and this is the principal contribution of the
paper.
Author: Rocio de la Torre,
Amaia Lusa, Manuel Mateo
Journal Code: jptindustrigg160055
